Today's Reuters Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News:
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Indian scientists try to crack monsoon source code
Fri,20 Jul 2012 02:32 AM PDT
Reuters -  NEW DELHI/BHUBANESHWAR (Reuters) - Scientists aided by supercomputers are trying to unravel one of Mother Nature's biggest mysteries -- the vagaries of the summer monsoon rains that bring life, and sometimes death, to India every year. In a first-of-its-kind project, Indian scientists aim to build computer models that would allow them to make a quantum leap in predicting the erratic movements of the monsoon. If successful, the impact would be life-changing in a country where 600 million people depend on farming for their livelihoods and where agriculture contributes 15 percent to the economy. ...
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NASA hires SpaceX for science satellite launch
Thu,19 Jul 2012 05:23 PM PDT
Reuters - CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA hired Space Exploration Technologies to launch an ocean monitoring satellite, a key win for the start-up rocket company that also wants to break into the U.S. military's launch business, NASA officials said on Thursday. The $82 million contract covers launch, payload processing and other services for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's ocean-measuring Jason-3 satellite, which is slated to fly in December 2014. Launch would take place from SpaceX's new complex at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. ... Full Story | Top |
Analysis: Biosensors - the canary in a coalmine worth $13 billion
Thu,19 Jul 2012 11:16 AM PDT
Reuters - LONDON (Reuters) - When Tony Turner started studying the arcane area of biosensors 30 years ago, the market for those devices was worth only $5 million a year and he used to see one research paper on the subject every two years. Now a professor at Linkoping University in Sweden running a department dedicated to bioelectronics, Turner says a study he led at Cranfield University in Britain found the devices now generate annual sales of $13 billion and spawned 6,000 research papers last year. ... Full Story | Top |
Visitors to get first up-close look at space shuttle in New York
Thu,19 Jul 2012 05:47 AM PDT
Reuters -  NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Enterprise has landed in New York City, where starting on Thursday the public will be allowed a close-up look at the first, prototype space shuttle created by NASA in 1976. The Enterprise exhibit is expected to boost attendance at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum by a third and help bring nearly 1.3 million people a year to the repurposed World War Two aircraft carrier docked on Manhattan's West Side. ...
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France's 20th century radium craze still haunts Paris
Thu,19 Jul 2012 12:56 AM PDT
Reuters - CHAVILLE, France (Reuters) - The Belle Epoque, France's golden era at the turn of the last century, bequeathed Paris elegant landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, but also a more sinister legacy of radioactive floors and backyards which the capital is only now addressing. When the Franco-Polish Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie discovered the radioactive element radium in 1898, she set off a craze for the luminescent metal among Parisians, who started using it for everything from alarm clock dials to lipsticks and even water fountains. ... Full Story | Top |
EU Commission backs open-access science publishing
Tue,17 Jul 2012 07:27 AM PDT
Reuters - LONDON (Reuters) - The European Commission, which controls one of the world's largest science budgets, has backed calls for free access to publicly funded research in a move that could force a major change in the business model for publishers such as Reed Elsevier. The Commission said on Tuesday that open access will be a "general principle" applied to grants awarded through the 80 billion euro ($97.92 billion) Horizon 2020 program for research and innovation. ... Full Story | Top |
HIV drug creator Antonin Holy dies at 75
Tue,17 Jul 2012 05:18 AM PDT
Reuters - PRAGUE (Reuters) - Czech scientist Antonin Holy, who played an important role in creating drugs to treat HIV and AIDS, has died at the age of 75, the Czech Academy of Sciences said on Tuesday. Holy died on Monday - the day U.S. health regulators for the first time approved using Truvada, a drug that he helped develop, to prevent infection in people who face a high risk of contracting the virus that causes AIDS. [ID:nL2E8IG8TG] Truvada includes Viread, a drug used to treat HIV, which Holy created with virologist Erik De Clercq. ... Full Story | Top |
NASA's Mars rover may be in for blind landing
Mon,16 Jul 2012 01:52 PM PDT
Reuters -  CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA's new Mars rover is heading for a risky do-or-die touchdown next month to assess conditions for life on the planet, but the U.S. space agency may not know for hours whether it arrived safely, managers said on Monday. That's because the satellite that NASA was counting on for real-time coverage of the Mars Science Laboratory's descent into Gale Crater, located near the planet's equator, was sidelined last month by a maneuvering system glitch. ...
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Open access science debate shifts to EU after UK government backing
Mon,16 Jul 2012 10:38 AM PDT
Reuters - LONDON (Reuters) - The debate over free access to publicly-funded scientific research will shift to the European Commission after the UK government backed a report calling for financial support for researchers to use so-called 'open access' science journals. Open access journals charge researchers a fee for publishing their research rather than the subscriptions that traditional journals charge readers. ... Full Story | Top |
German scientists concoct new coolant for electric cars
Fri,13 Jul 2012 04:12 PM PDT
Reuters - LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists in Germany have come up with a new fluid for cooling the expensive batteries in electric cars and thereby extending their life, another potential step in improving the cost efficiency of electric propulsion. The fluid, dubbed CryoSolplus, absorbs heat more effectively than either air or water and could allow for tighter packing of batteries under the hood, according to a team of researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology in Oberhausen. ... Full Story | Top |
U.S. should scale down $1 billion Kansas biodefense lab: study
Fri,13 Jul 2012 02:54 PM PDT
Reuters -  KANSAS CITY, Kansas (Reuters) - The United States should consider scaling down ambitious plans for a $1 billion laboratory in Kansas to study potentially deadly animal diseases, the National Research Council said on Friday in a key report to help the government decide how to proceed. Construction of the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility in Manhattan, Kansas, has been stalled by concerns that deadly animal diseases could escape and devastate agriculture. Some have called the facility a costly boondoggle. ...
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Gene-swapping vaccines spawn lethal poultry virus: experts
Thu,12 Jul 2012 11:59 AM PDT
Reuters - HONG KONG (Reuters) - Three vaccines used to prevent respiratory disease in chickens have swapped genes, producing two lethal new strains that have killed tens of thousands of fowl across two states in Australia, scientists reported on Friday. The creation of the deadly new variant was only possible because the vaccines contained live viruses, even though they were weakened forms, said Joanne Devlin, lead author of the paper published in the journal Science. Devlin and her team discovered how closely related the two new strains were with viruses in the vaccines after analyzing their genes. ... Full Story | Top |
No crustacean, no cry? Bob Marley gets his own species
Tue,10 Jul 2012 02:14 PM PDT
Reuters -  WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Reggae immortal Bob Marley has joined Barack Obama and Elvis Presley in the elite club of those who have biological species named in their honor. In Marley's case, it's a small parasitic crustacean blood feeder that infests fish in Caribbean coral reefs, now known as Gnathia marleyi. "I named this species, which is truly a natural wonder, after Marley because of my respect and admiration for Marley's music," Paul Sikkel, a marine biologist at Arkansas State University, said in a statement on Tuesday. "Plus, this species is as uniquely Caribbean as Marley. ...
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Giant ice telescope hunts for dark matter's space secrets
Tue,10 Jul 2012 12:02 AM PDT
Reuters -  MELBOURNE (Reuters) - Scientists are using the world's biggest telescope, buried deep under the South Pole, to try to unravel the mysteries of tiny particles known as neutrinos, hoping to shed light on how the universe was made. The mega-detector, called IceCube, took 10 years to build 2,400 meters below the Antarctic ice. At one cubic km, it is bigger than the Empire State building, the Chicago Sears Tower - now known as Willis Tower - and Shanghai's World Financial Center combined. ...
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Hawking's rival says Higgs wager win is icing on cake
Fri,6 Jul 2012 10:24 AM PDT
Reuters -  LONDON (Reuters) - The U.S. scientist who won a $100 wager with Stephen Hawking over whether the Higgs boson would ever be found said on Friday winning was the icing on the cake of a major scientific discovery. Scientists at Europe's CERN research centre announced on Wednesday that they had found a new subatomic particle which appeared to be the boson imagined and named half a century ago by theoretical physicist Peter Higgs. Hawking, Britain's most famous living scientist, said the discovery should earn Higgs the Nobel Prize, but admitted in an interview that it would make him $100 poorer. ...
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